I recently overheard a friend once mention that he is an addict of the very popular social network site, Facebook 
. Many people will no doubt be able to identify with this situation as a full hour in a day hardly passes by without checking the updates posted by friends, colleagues connected to them from all countries around the world.
Social networking sites are so significant such that when one of the sites that have a large membership from around the world hit a 200 million membership mark in early 2009 (membership size is now 300million), it made a big deal out of it by splashing the figures all over pages of the media all over the world. In
The nearest to today’s social networking website was called “Friends Re-United” 
and was developed in 1999 as a tool to re-connect old friends who attended same schools or grew up in United Kingdom and had lost connection. Social networking websites morphed from online communities such as forums dedicated to certain issues and started from popular sites such as Yahoo Geocities, which enabled different communities made up of people with several interests to link up each other. Websites such as Friends Reunited were built for initially were those who attended schools in the pre-internet age and pre-mobile phone age, as they were unable to exchange contact details that were not fixed to a particular spot such as fixed landlines. As these friends moved residences, most friends lost touch and thus created the fertile ground to create the very first social networking sites to reconnect such friends as well as relatives who had moved to very distant areas.
Friends Reunited was initially very successful netting over 20 million members in United Kingdom at its peak in 2003, however, its business model was soon to hit a brick wall as the income made from attracting corporate advertising was unable sustain business operational expenses. Its business executives were able to convince a less-knowledgeable board of ITV Communications,
Wikipedia lists 158 active social networking sites on its list of websites. Popular social networking sites include Linkedin - business networking, Orkut - Google owned social site, Black planet - African American networking, Twitter - microblogging site and many more.
Most of these websites are international in nature and membership is usually in hundreds of thousands, or the website serves several interests for members.
Research credited to Wikipedia material
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